Cycling through windows in dual-screen

Submitted by Andrzej

Assigned to Olivier Fourdan @olivier

Link to original bug (#8865)

Description

Currently xfwm4 cycles through all the windows on current workspace.

While that's one possible design choice, other (arguably more convenient for users) would be to limit cycling to windows on the current screen as well. I think this warrants an option, perhaps ON by default.

Not sure which screen should be considered "active" - the one with a focused window, or the one with mouse cursor.

Another possible choice would be to display all available windows in several rows - one per screen. This could work nicely with the newly added cursor key navigation.

My subjective explanation: When I work with multiple screens I rarely think of them as a single common space - they "feel" more like separate workspaces to me. That mental model works reasonably well until I press Alt-Tab, which forces me to deal with all the additional windows from the other screen.

Liv said:

For info, this seems like an oft-requested feature for people using multiple monitors:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/220165/switch-windows-only-in-current-workspace-and-display

Liv said:

To give an idea of what flexibility is allowed elsewhere, in Skippy-XD (a full-screen task-switcher for X11 similar to Mac OS X's Exposé feature) you can: "To avoid displaying windows from other virtual desktops, set [general] -> showAllDesktops to 'false'. Should work on most EWMH compliant WMs.

To avoid displaying windows from other Xinerama screens, set [xinerama] -> showAll to 'false'.

To avoid displaying windows from other, separate X displays, set [general] -> includeAllScreens to 'false'. (But this is a hidden switch and is disabled by default.)"

See https://github.com/richardgv/skippy-xd/issues/35#issuecomment-32977001 .

Olivier Fourdan @olivier said:

Not a feature I would like myself so I won;t add it (myself) but if someone else i willing to give it a try, I might consider a well written patch for inclusion.

Thing is, this would be incompatible with the tabwin shown on both monitors, as both would show different content and there is only one keyboard/mouse/user to choose.

I am quite attached to he same tabwin showing on all monitors as I use it all the time (I don't have to think on which monitor I have to look at to select my windows, and I really miss that on gnome-shell where the tabwin shows only on the primary monitor, but on gnome-shell, the windows preview is per monitor so it's less of a problem).

Andrzej said:

I would like to point to the bug #8867 where we are discussing focus issues with sticky windows.

Sticky windows are an idiomatic way (in X, at least) of keeping windows visible on multiple workspaces. They could be used instead of the mechanism described here but, as they end up stealing focus from other windows, they are much less useful than they could be.

Ignacio Losiggio said:

A friend of mine asked me if i could help him with this issue several months ago. I made a dirty patch and forgot about it. Now another friend is asking for the same feature. I have an almost working patch (i currently cannot test it myself because i don't have a dual-monitor setup in my house). Would someone check if it's good enough for submission?

Any critic of my work is welcome

URL: https://github.com/iglosiggio/xfwm4/commit/0a42e70f22624bb8e7efa2f83455b19ba2e39591

Ignacio Losiggio submitted a patch:

Patch 8522, "Patch that adds the option of cycling through all windows in the current workspace":
0001-cycling-Add-cycling-through-all-windows-on-the-curre.patch

Ignacio Losiggio submitted a patch:

(In reply to Ignacio Losiggio from comment 5)

Sorry, i sent the wrong patch and wrong link (i forgot to clean the repo).

URL: https://github.com/iglosiggio/xfwm4/commit/d9874d75bd8a7df0aa594b8528f8f521f9014ffb

Patch 8523, "Patch that adds the option of cycling through all windows in the current workspace":
0001-cycling-Add-cycling-through-all-windows-on-the-curre.patch

Nilesh @njkevlani said:

Any update on this? I would be a nice feature to have for people with multiple monitors.

Ignacio Losiggio said:

I've received some comments on my patch (https://github.com/iglosiggio/xfwm4/commit/d9874d75bd8a7df0aa594b8528f8f521f9014ffb#r33866008) and i'm not using xfwm4 currently.

I could rebase my changes and try to get a working patch again (i assume not much has changed) but i would like a comment from someone upstream before commiting any more work. Btw, if you want to try the patch and have any problems feel free to drop me an email or an issue :D

Nilesh @njkevlani said:

Btw, if you want to try the patch and have any problems feel free to drop me an email or an issue :D

Thanks for the awesome work. Tried that patch, with https://github.com/xfce-mirror/xfwm4/tree/xfce-4.14 merged with it.

git clone https://github.com/iglosiggio/xfwm4
git remote add upstream https://github.com/xfce-mirror/xfwm4
git pull upstream 
git merge upstream/xfce-4.14 
./autogen.sh     --prefix=/usr     --libexecdir=/usr/lib     --sysconfdir=/etc     --localstatedir=/var     --disable-dependency-tracking     --disable-static     --enable-epoxy     --enable-startup-notification     --enable-xsync     --enable-render     --enable-randr     --enable-xpresent     --enable-compositor     --disable-debug
make
sudo make install 

It works for most of the part but found something buggy. Attaching a video, have a look at 0:25. It did not work properly for some cases.

https://imgur.com/a/1LD62As

Ignacio Losiggio said:

Mmm seems like some kind of off-by-one-pixel bug. I will try to solve that :)

Ignacio Losiggio submitted a patch:

This patch adds the fix provided by GreyAlien502 (https://github.com/iglosiggio/xfwm4/commit/d9874d75bd8a7df0aa594b8528f8f521f9014ffb#r33866008). I currently do not have a multi-monitor setup to test it.

Patch 9412, "Patch that adds the option of cycling through all windows in the current workspace":
0001-cycling-Add-cycling-through-all-windows-on-the-curre.patch

Ignacio Losiggio said:

(In reply to Nilesh from comment 10)

It works for most of the part but found something buggy. Attaching a video, have a look at 0:25. It did not work properly for some cases.

https://imgur.com/a/1LD62As

I've updated the patch with a possible fix. I do not have a multi-monitor setup to test it. Tell me if it helped :)

https://bugzilla.xfce.org/attachment.cgi?id=9412

Ignacio Losiggio said:

If you try to merge the patch it wouldn't work (i've rebased the branch to upstream/master). Cherry picking my branch works.

git cherry-pick iglosiggio/8865-dual-screen-cycling

Nilesh @njkevlani said:

Tried it, and the bug seems to be resolved :)

Ignacio Losiggio said:

Yay! Now we need to ask someone on the xfce team to review the patch in hopes of upstreaming it.

Öyvind Saether uploaded an attachment:

I have tested the patch and it appears to work as advertised. The new "Cycle only through windows in the active monitor" setting under "Cycling" in "Window manager Tweaks" works as advertised on a 3 monitor setup.

I don't like that feature and I am not going to use it so it is nice that it is disabled by default. It is also nice that the feature is there in case I change my mind.

I do wonder if the comment "Estos son datos basura que no voy a usar" (something about junk data?) in the patch could/should be in English not Spanish. I'm personally fine with it.

I see no reason why this can't be merged as-is to those who want the feature can have it.

Attachment 9416, "The patch works fine on my desktop.":

Ignacio Losiggio said:

Yup, that "datos basura" is an unneeded spanish comment saying that some data is not used.

My native language is Spanish.

If someone upstream wants to merge the patch I will clean the code if necessary!

I would suggest to create a merge request in gitlab, so we can review your patch.

... just as a sidenode, for the impatient, as long as the "Cycle only through windows in the active monitor" function, for which I am really looking forward to, is not yet available in the XFCE distribution, as an temporary workaround you can use: Compiz "Static Application Switcher", it presents the Alt-Tab-Window only on the monitor, where the current active Window is shown. (But please be warned, it was not simple for me on Manjaro XFCE, to get this Compiz working. Took time and nerves ;) e.g. I could'nt resize windows any more with dragging the mouse on the lower window border line, but when having switched to theme greybird (xfce-theme-greybird 3.22.12-1 on manjaro) then it worked.)

Is this function planned to be fixed/added in the upcoming xfce release? This is one of the long-standing issues for people like me who love to use xfce in their daily work setup with multiple monitors. So far there is no proper workaround to avoid the annoying window cycling animation on all the screens which most of the other popular desktops option do not suffer from.

Upstream will automatically show the window switcher only on the primary monitor, rather than all monitors.

And the patch as it is, is not acceptable upstream..